The Purloined Ipod

If you read detective fiction, or watch TV, you might imagine that criminals hide stolen/illegal goods in cunning cubby-holes and behind trick floorboards. Occasionally they do, but more commonly drugs and stolen goods are hidden in full view, but surrounded by layers of such unsanitary possessions that any self-respecting police officer would rather not find it than root through them.

A typical example, although this one is rather clean (there are no smudges on the walls or cooker).






Here are some ways to hide your booty, all used by criminals in Blandmore in the last six months:

1. If there are children in the house, their clothes can be put to good use in the following way: when the clothes have been worn, they go in the laundry basket. When the next set of clothes have been worn, they should go in another laundry basket. When seven laundry baskets are full and overflowing, the children can start to wear the clothes from laundry basket 1 again. At no stage should any of the clothes actually be laundered.
2. The same can apply to bedclothes. If any of the children (or adults) wet the bed, the soiled sheets should be stuffed into cupboards in such a manner that they will unfurl rapidly on top of anyone opening the cupboard. If you run out of bedclothes, the children should just sleep on a bare mattress, or the floor.
   
3. Never wash up a plate, knife or fork. Instead just leave them in opportune places around the house, such as: under your duvet, on a chair, at the bottom of a heap of laundry (see 1, above).
4. Never clean the floor. After a year or two you will develop a comforting layer of fluff and filth that no one will want to search through.
5. Buy a dog and don't take it for walks. If it fouls in the house, just tread the mess into the carpet and you'll get used to the smell within a day or so.
6. If you use drugs, just litter the place with your by-products. Needles should be discarded two or three deep. Foil and scorch marks should cover every available surface, including the ceiling. Indeed, if drugs are your thing, you can even strip the place of all furniture and soft furnishings, and just decorate with drugs paraphernalia.
   
7. If you have something really illegal, hide it in a lockable cabinet with a kitten. A few weeks after the kitten dies, no one will go near the cabinet.

These are all things my colleagues and I have come across this year. It isn't a small proportion of houses we visit that are like this, it is about half. The How Clean Is Your House brigade wouldn't even step over the thresholds. People who live like this have lost all sense of proportion: they can no longer see the dirt, or smell it. For some reason, their kids never grow up with lung cancer, never stick themselves on needles, never starve to death. They are used to the filth and do not even notice it.

Social Services know these kids are being brought up in surroundings like these. But the social workers have seen it so many times that they barely notice it either.

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'Diary of an On-Call Girl' is available in some bookstores and online.